Dr. Tom Woods has weighed on the Charlie Kirk tragedy. Woods does this along with Kevin Dolan. Kevin Dolan created a fraternity for men who wanted to create something for themselves outside the soul-crushing corporate structure that was making them wonder daily about their lives: “Is this really all there is?”
Kevin also helps people accomplish things: better job, a business of their own, losing 50 pounds, etc. In a world of liars and savages, people you can trust — and who can help you in every area of life — are more valuable than ever.
Kevin Dolan makes the point that some people on the right want to make it sound as if Kirk’s moral high ground comes from his willingness to dialogue with people. That is, Charlie Kirk was willing to reach across the aisle, so to speak. That is wrong. That mischaracterizes both who Charlie Kirk was and just what his mission was.
The mantra we are hearing from some media outlets, perhaps many of them, is “we’re all Americans” and “what unites us is more important than what divides us.” I say while we may all be Americans, the thought about unity is just BS.
Kevin Dolan:
Tyler Robinson needs to have been a deeply unusual person whose actions do not enjoy mainstream approval, and
His radicalization needs to be in some way orthogonal to partisan politics, something that “could have happened to anyone.”
But of course, neither of these things is true. By all accounts, Tyler appears to have been weird in alarmingly common ways: it wasn’t Jodie Foster or his dog telling him to kill people — it was his social circle of radical communist transsexuals, and a broader Left that is increasingly comfortable with (at least) rhetorical calls for political violence.
And even if you wanted to argue that he was a lone nut, we now have over 60,000 documented posts cheering the murder, with hundreds of thousands undocumented, and millions of combined likes and shares.
My friends and I have been surprised, not only at the depth of hatred people had for Charlie, but the comfort they feel in expressing it under their real names.
Just give this a little thought. There are tens of thousands of people in this country who expressed happiness that Charlie Kirk was murdered in front of his children. And they signed their own names to such expressions of glee. There were many more who were okay with it and shared these messages of glee. Some even called for the murder of the rest of his family.
This is vile. This is depravity on a scale that is difficult to quantify or express. This clearly indicates that every person who disagrees with the Left has a target on his/her back. If you wear a MAGA hat, if you are a fan of Charlie Kirk, if you support PDJT, you are fair game to these people.
This makes Jimmy Kimmel’s words even more reprehensible. What Kimmel is telling these people who might engage in such violence, ‘I will whitewash your crime.’ And he’s gonna say ‘I will whitewash that, and I will assist in blaming the MAGA movement for these assassinations.’
Comparisons on the Right for such activity are impossible to find. This puts the lie to the argument that “both sides do it.” There have been a few acts of violence (think Gabby Gifford in 2011, Dylan Roof in 2015). None of these elicited the sadistic glee that we are seeing now.
Kevin Dolan:
Mostly these events are met with confusion and annoyance — none of the victims of these crimes were major antagonists that right-wingers had strong feelings about, or, indeed, that we had even heard of prior to the crime. In the case of Gabby Giffords, the assassination attempt was what gave her national political relevance….
We don’t identify with the attackers at all, who are obviously lunatics engaged in disordered, meaningless, and counterproductive violence.
Conservatives find such violence to be insane, reprehensible and so far outside the bounds of moral action. Such individuals are rejected and condemned. Where is the condemnation of Charlie Kirk’s horrendous murder from the Left?
Kevin Dolan:
Maybe many leftists don’t exactly identify with their schizos’ particular motives, either — but they clearly identify with the violence.
Leftist schizos target people that mainstream leftists want targeted: they feel intense frisson and catharsis when these people are hurt or killed, and they don’t mind telling you about it.
From these facts, you could argue that the Right are simply gentle, non-violent true-believers in Free Speech and the Marketplace of Ideas — “The Real Liberals.”
But framing it that way is both dishonest, and a strategic error….
Political dialogue can serve one of two purposes, conveniently represented by Charlie Kirk and [Utah governor] Spencer Cox:
You can talk to your opponents about the facts and attempt to persuade them — to come to a common understanding of reality and thus eliminate conflict. This is what Charlie Kirk meant when he discussed the need for dialogue.
You can negotiate with your opponents to find an acceptable modus vivendi in spite of irreconcilable differences of opinion and perspective. This is largely what Spencer Cox means when he says we need to “Disagree Better.”
The question before us is whether either form of dialogue is still possible or desirable.
This is the real issue facing the country. Is dialogue possible or desirable or has the country reached a breaking point where one side will necessarily have to win out over the other side?
